Royal Conservatoire of
Scotland, Glasgow
Four Stars
There is something
unflinching about Alice Birch’s overlapping dramatic triptych, performed here
with relentless drive by the RCS’ final year BA Acting students. This is the
case from the play’s gauntlet-throwing title onwards, as it edges slowly but
surely towards the inevitable set of conclusions it marks out across 70 years
and three generations of women. The painful study of hand-me-down neuroses that
unfurls across time-zones is forensic and at times harrowing in its
matter-of-fact study of Carol, Anna and Bonnie, whose lives it maps and
unravels as they mentally self-lacerate themselves to death.
As Carol, Vera Koski
lays bare both her character’s quietly self-destructive tendencies and a perceptive
and articulate self-knowingness, though Anna’s birth does nothing to heal her. Anna
by turn goes her own way, going from heroin using wild child to worn-out mum at
the end of her tether with the arrival of her daughter Bonnie. This is brought
to life by Charlie Oscar with a mixture of bravado and vulnerability. Nancy
Mitson’s Bonnie may be childless, but she too is laden with piled-on anxieties
not of her making.
As volleys of cross-talk
rattle through the years, it becomes a dazzling atonal symphony of words from
each timeline, the counterpoints of which are as insistent and as demanding as
a modernist chorale or a Robert Ashley spoken-word opera. The occasional
politesse of saying yes, no or thank-you are fleeting moments of unison across
the years.
Director Finn den Hertog’s
sensitive knitting together of the play’s various strands among his cast of
eleven becomes a howl of hurt as troublingly intense as a Jane Arden film. Astrid
Lindgreen Hjermind’s tile-covered set, meanwhile, suggests that wiping away the
mess isn’t as easy as it looks. Koski, Oscar and Mitson’s portraits of three
shades of despair suggests each woman might shatter into a thousand pieces any
second in a staggering impressionistic evocation of fractured psyches in
freefall.
The Herald, November 1st 2019
ends
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